Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, whether he plans to continue to participate in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change when the UK leaves the EU.

The UK is a world leader in climate change and has always been a party to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) individually as well as through the EU and we are bound by all the obligations of the Paris Agreement under international law.

The UK’s commitment to action to tackle climate change and to the UNFCCC process is not in doubt; we remain firmly committed to the Paris Agreement and to our emissions reduction and climate finance efforts under it. We have demonstrated our commitment domestically – we were the first country to introduce legally binding emissions reduction targets through the Climate Change Act, and we have recently published our highly praised Clean Growth Strategy, which is ambitious and robust in setting out how we will decarbonise the UK economy through the 2020s. The UK is also committed to phasing out unabated coal power generation by 2025, and at the recent twenty-third Conference of the Parties (COP23) the UK, joint with Canada, announced the Powering Past Coal Alliance which gained the support of more than 20 partners. Internationally, through our International Climate Finance we have committed to provide at least £5.8bn between 2016 and 2020 to developing countries, to help them mitigate and adapt to the impacts of climate change.

Whatever the nature of the future UK-EU relationship, the UK will remain committed to international efforts to tackle climate change, and working closely with the EU will remain very important.